


One Stop on the Road

by youcantgettherefromhere



Category: Indiana Jones Series
Genre: 1920s, Angst with a Happy Ending, Drunken Confessions, F/M, Not Canon Compliant, One Shot, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-03
Updated: 2016-10-03
Packaged: 2018-08-19 06:42:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8194133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youcantgettherefromhere/pseuds/youcantgettherefromhere
Summary: Upstate New York, June 1928
While stopping for the night on a road trip with Marion, Indy has to confront one more of his mistakes.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't very canon and I'm not sure if it's that historically accurate either but that's why people write fanfic my dudes

The lamp on the worn hotel nightstand cast a marbled glow through his glass of water, and Indy reached for another sip as Marion dissolved into drunken laughter again. 

“I knew this’d be fun,” she slurred happily, and threw an arm around his waist, hitting his hand that held the glass of water and spilling some onto the blanket. Indy leaned back against the wall, resting his weary head on the fading wallpaper and feeling the day’s tension begin to drain from his broad shoulders. 

He’d picked her up that afternoon from the small college just outside New York where she’d been studying for the past two years. They had only been driving an hour when a large black car with a red hood ornament began following them, carrying a pair of men in striped suits and perfectly angled hats. He’d woven through slower traffic and plunged down side roads until the two found themselves on an empty stretch of highway and he’d floored it while Marion laughed and flung an arm out of the window. Within an hour or so, they’d both picked up the telltale flapping sound of a flat, and once Indy had pulled the car over and gotten out to change the offending tire, Marion had clambered over the seat, tearing the long skirt of her dress, to check behind them for pursuers. At one point, while reaching up to take a jack from Marion’s outstretched hand, Indy had glimpsed two hulking silhouettes inside a passing blur which sported a flash of red. Still behind the car, he’d taken off his suit jacket and the plain gray hat he wore, growling a warning to Marion. She’d handed him his old, battered brown fedora from her perch in the car while she fished a blonde wig out of one of the bags she’d piled on the back seat. 

The brown hat was now dangling off the bedpost, still streaked with dust and sweat from - where had Indy’s job taken him last? Oh, right, Mount Ararat. The torn dress, a conservative deep blue number that Marion only ever wore to avoid scolding from old-fashioned professors, lay in a crumpled dark heap against the wall, and the pale nightgown she now wore already had a stain of whiskey on the neckline the flask she was drinking from. 

“Must’ve been the mob,” Indy mused. “Rizzo’s guys. The pinstripes make me think-” 

“I don’t wanna hear another damn word about those men in the black car,” Marion laughed, and leaned over to clap one hand over Indy’s mouth. “I wanna hear about everything we’re going to see tomorrow and all the fun we’ll have after we drink all the hooch we brought.” 

“What hooch?” he replied with a yawn, fumbling for his watch on the nightstand. 

“The hooch I’ve got in my bags,” she grinned back as she stretched aimlessly across the bed. 

The hour hand on Indy’s weathered watch had moved far past 12. He ran one hand, heavy with fatigue, through his sandy hair. “I’m turning off the light,” he rumbled, reaching over to pull the cord. Darkness gently washed over the room. 

Indy settled his head onto the pillow and let his eyes adjust to the night and the weak glow from the outside streetlights that filtered in between the curtains. The late June humidity added a muggy stickiness to the sheets, and he found himself pushing the blankets away and rolling over onto his back to catch the breeze. At least it was upstate New York and not the swamp in Cambodia where he’d been back in February... 

“Hey, Indy?” Marion mumbled on the other side of the bed. “How come you had to ruin my first year of college?” 

“Huh?” he yawned again, woken from his half-sleep. He could hear the faint sound of Marion pulling on her flask. Great. 

“Two years ago. Every damn time I saw my father, you were there too, and you knew I couldn’t stop thinking about you, and in every letter my father wrote to me, he told me to stay away from you. He told me not to let you take advantage of me.” 

Indy waited. 

“And I was a damn fool. I did. You swept me off my feet and I let you do it and I gave up all my time for you. My father told me I was just a foolish girl in love who needed to study more instead and tried to lock me up with my books from Christmas till I went back to school. He took the letters you sent me that winter and left them God knows where, he barely let me out of the house and I wished I’d never met you! I could’ve done so much and you let me waste all the fun I could’ve had on you.” 

“Eighteen’s old enough to know what you want,” Indy murmured. 

“I was just a kid, Jones!” Her voice rose sharply. “I didn’t even go to high school because my father was too busy dragging me around the globe! I didn’t know anything, and here you were at twenty-seven, this graduate student chasing after freshman girls. And you already had a reputation for… messing around. It’s been two years since we started talking. What’d you think I was two years ago?” 

“Marion-"

“And what’d you think I was in May when you walked into my father’s office while he was in the library and kissed me as soon as you saw me? We hadn’t talked in a year and I fell right back…” She trailed off. 

For a moment, all there was to hear was the clack of Marion setting the flask down on her nightstand and someone snoring in the room next door.

Maybe she was right. That first September afternoon two years before, Indy had been in Abner’s office, lounging on a chair with one leg thrown over the side and riffling through the notebook he’d filled with diagrams and scribbles on the last dig. The door had crashed open and Marion, probably returning from some tennis match with a new friend, burst in, noticed the lean body in the armchair, and stopped dead in her tracks. If the eyes were windows to the soul, he’d stared transfixed right into the sun, trails of flame crackling on the edges and all. It wasn’t a kind of warmth he’d known before, and as fall turned to winter, he’d found himself needing it more and more. Now, in this small town where they were probably the only people awake, he could still feel it, but this time, it was an indignant heat that smoldered and snapped and trembled on the edge of bursting. Maybe it was best to just wait till morning and let it burn off- 

“I’m sorry.” The words slipped out of Indy’s mouth before he could tell they’d formed. _You shouldn’t have said that_ , he immediately thought. Silence swallowed the room once more. 

The tips of Marion’s fingers brushed his arm, and he started at the sudden touch but relaxed again as she wrapped her hand around his and curled up against his side. A few crickets chirped outside the window and the breeze ruffled the curtains and brushed his face. He could feel her next to him finally relaxing, and as he shut his eyes, he realized that maybe he’d said the right thing after all.


End file.
